


gymnopédie

by franzferdinand



Series: new skin for the old ceremony [4]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, assassin julian, but you don't really have to read that one, doctor is just garak's sarcastic nickname for him, it's related to the first prompt fill in this series, so uh, they're both just vague sketches of a plot anyway, this is the climax of a fic i haven't written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 11:20:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19973212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/franzferdinand/pseuds/franzferdinand
Summary: Prompt fill for the following:“You’re collapsing under the weight of your own lies, my dear. It was bound to happen eventually.”Also, kind of, a continuation of my other prompt fill, taking place in the same AU, later on.





	gymnopédie

“You’re collapsing under the weight of your own lies, my dear. It was bound to happen eventually.”

“I never lied to you. No matter what else I might have done, Elim, I never lied to you.” 

Garak sighed softly and leaned back into the chair, fingertips pressing into his eyes. 

“You’ll forgive me, Doctor, if I find that hard to believe.”

Julian just took several shivering breaths, the harsh curve of his back made all the worse by the glare of the light in Julian’s quarters. How had it seemed so soft to Garak just moments ago? What had changed from that soft moment, Julian asleep, sated, curled around Kukalaka, Garak content to watch him as he sewed? 

Of course, it wasn’t really a question at all. Everything had changed, even as nothing did. Julian was still draped in a soft purple nightshirt and little else, the remnants of their shared dinner still lay on the table. The only difference was the PADD in Garak’s hand, stark green letters burning themselves into his mind even now that he’d looked away. Julian’s breath was still ragged, worn thin from the defenses he had tried to spin, explanations for what was before them both, clear as glass. 

Julian raised his head slowly, his eyes burning like the stars outside the porthole. There was something tragic about his face that threatened to tear into Garak’s chest, rip all the anger out of him until it was all he could do to take the man into his arms and kiss the tears from his cheeks. It was not a weakness he could afford. He turned his head back to the PADD and took a deep breath. 

“Doctor,” he began, just as Julian’s mouth opened. Whatever he was going to say, Garak’s voice chased it back down his throat. “I am not a fool. Whatever success your deception might have had, surely you must realize that there is nothing you could possibly say to rectify this.” _Nothing to bring us back to before_ , he wanted to scream. _How could you do this to me?_

He found himself rising, his voice again gaining some of its previous intensity. The fire fed on the fuel. “You have been lying to me since the minute we met, my _dear_ \--” and the endearment dripped off his lips like poison--”I regret my own part in the charade. All the better that it shall go on no longer.” 

Before his eyes Julian’s face went slack, his eyes widening like a frightened animal. It was impossible not to see all of him, not for it to tug at the beast inside of Garak that craved to forgive and to protect this terrorized thing before him. There was the monster that revelled in the white-knuckle clench of the man’s hands on his blanket and the monster that would tear the world asunder to bring a smile back to that face.

“I. . .” 

The tragedy of that syllable was enough to quench the forest fire at the back of Garak’s throat. It was all he could do to listen.

“I never meant to hurt you,” Julian croaked, and Garak almost believed him. “I know I was supposed to. I know what the PADD says. But I never wanted to lie to you. You have to believe me.” 

“I have to do no such thing.” 

He could see the shudder Julian barely concealed, and it looked like something soft tearing. 

“Whatever I lied about, whatever I said about the past, none of that ever mattered to me. I just knew that if you knew, you would hate me. And I was right.” 

Garak’s voice was steel wrapped in velvet. All smooth, but just as capable of wounding. “That decision was not yours to make, Doctor. That presumption was not yours to have. You walked into my shop knowing full well the kind of man I was and you assumed what--that I would not understand the business of espionage? That I would condemn a man for the task he was set, as though he had any part in setting it?” 

Again, Julian’s throat worked. When he spoke, his voice was thin. “I was afraid. I was so used to lying about everything that it hardly seemed any different. At first, anyway. The truth was so big and whatever we had was so delicate.” 

Garak knew fear. Fear and regret had been his bedfellows from a young age, and it was fear and regret that had laid with him every night until Julian had come to take that place. He even knew Julian’s fear, the knowledge that whatever was inside of you was too fearsome to ever see the light of day, was too horrific to ever be unchained. 

_Why could we not have been monsters together?_

“I knew I wasn’t supposed to care. I knew they wanted me to make a clean break once I was done with you. I didn’t--” Julian’s voice shattered, and he let his face fall into his hands before he continued. “I didn’t want to lie. I told you I was supposed to kill you, and that was the truth. At least part of it. Can’t you see that?” 

He could. His world was made of half-truths, lies of omission and rules of elimination. He had been built by other people’s assumptions, and now he could see how much of the firmament of Julian Bashir had been built by his own. Now the play was over, and the masks were coming off. It was horrifying to think that whatever Bashir hid might not have been so different from the mask after all. Garak wanted to hate the creature beneath, wanted to resent whatever Julian had kept from him this whole time. There had to be someone pulling the strings, directing the man he had fallen in love with from the sidelines. The more he dug, the more obvious it became that there was no one else. There were the masters far in the distance, the critics and the playwrights who all wanted their say, but in the end it was simple. The medium had always been the message. It had always been Julian. Damnable, beautiful Julian, at once the tortured soul and the gentle youth, curious and world-weary all at once. A glorious contradiction. Wholly, entirely true.

“Elim?” 

Julian had stood without him noticing.

“Elim, please say something,” Julian was whispering, those soft human hands of his taking one of Garak’s own.Placing the PADD back on the desk. A distant part of him noticed the care with which Julian acted, avoiding pressing palm to palm, careful to avoid anything too forward. Simply showing his presence the simplest way he could: touch. “Anything.”

“I want to forgive you,” his heart said, before his brain could stop it. “I want to say you could not have done otherwise, that what became of this was inevitable.” It was his turn to take a deep breath, to steel himself for the worst. “But how can I? Your mission was to make me fall in love with you. A resounding success, all parties agree. You made me fall in love with you for the information. For the distant eyes of a Cardassian who hates me already. All so you could extract whatever secrets I had left.” 

The words burned as they left his mouth, and for one wild second he wanted to see them, wanted to burn them into Julian’s smooth skin, brand him. He wanted to make his shame and his rage into something physical, even if it was a pale reflection of what was inside him. 

“All so you could kill me once you had finished with me. How can I trust you after that? How am I to tell the truth from the lies? I have no way of knowing which touches were yours, and which were carefully calculated to endear you to me. Which compliments were real, and which were abject flattery? Which questions the curiosity of an intelligent mind and which the pronged barbs of a spy? How much of it was true?” 

“Oh, Elim,” Julian murmured, like a broken promise. “It was all true. Every bit of it. Even those times at the beginning, even when I was so uncertain, it was _true_. I was afraid of the truth. I was afraid of knowing that I loved you. But I did. I swear by all the gods I’ve ever known, I loved you. I still love you.”

It was all Garak could do to sit down without immediately crumbling, pulling Julian into his lap and crying until that hollow place inside of him was full, until the fires had burnt themselves out. The man never released his hand, just let himself sit beside Garak on the bed.

“How long were you going to let it continue?” Garak asked, letting the small question mask the larger ones brewing under his tongue. “How long until your employer recalled you?”

“I don’t know. Some time. He didn’t want to rush it.” 

A bitter laugh left Garak’s lips, and he wasn’t sure he knew where it had come from. “I suppose he knew I could have a tendency to be. . . skittish. Well, he needn’t have worried. Apparently there is something about you that makes me forget myself.” 

The silence that stretched after those words was long and taut. Garak could feel the heat coming off of Julian’s body, so distinctly human and so distinctly him that it hurt. All he wanted to do was press closer, like a child in the winter from one of Julian’s ridiculous novels. Unwilling to be pulled from the hearth for fear of the cold that awaited outside of that golden glow.

What was there to do? Julian had taken everything sacred and untainted inside of him and teased it out, let the parts of him too long hidden step blinking into the sun. He had reminded him of kindness and of pleasure and of warm summer days. He had talked with him over long lunches and after brief dinners, and their words had danced together to music only they could hear. Their courtship had been at once prolonged and sudden, careful and reckless. They had struck each other like lightning, against all the odds. He had remembered how to find loveliness in the world, It had been Julian who convinced him that Earth poetry could be beautiful and terrible all at once. The idea had been so Cardassian.

_Shape without form, shade without colour/paralysed force, gesture without motion._

_This is the way the world ends._

Julian had made him hollow, true, and filled him up again. The idea that he would have to go back to the way things were before, to that half-life filled him with the kind of fear he normally reserved for death, or worse, eternity. 

“He doesn’t have to know,” Julian murmured, and a glance told Garak that his eyes were gazing far away, to something Garak could not see. “Maybe--maybe I could give up on all of it. Stay here with you.” Those eyes turned to him, and they really saw him. All of him. “Fake my own death, or something. Take you far away and keep you safe. Anything.”

 _Anything_. Garak wanted to chain himself to _anything_ and let it fly him where the winds blew. He found his head far too level for that kind of reckless abandon, even now. When the thought struck him, he knew already that he could forgive Julian. That the monster inside him had looked at the monster inside Julian and stayed unafraid. No matter what decisions had been made by men bigger than either of them, no matter what master plans they were but small parts in, he could still see Julian for what he was: a broken man, perhaps, but a good one. A man who had learned to be many terrible things before anyone had told him he had a capacity for goodness. In many ways, still as afraid as Garak himself. But they were growing, slowly, together. How could he ever put a stop to that? 

“Not so fast, my dear,” Garak said quietly, his free hand coming up to rest on Julian’s arm. They were connected, tethered, stuck fast to one another. Julian’s heat burned him like the sun, blinded him, and the last thing he would do was look away. “As you said, there is time. We have time. Perhaps, even, the time to begin again.”

It was hoping against all hope. It was misguided and stupid and every fiber in Garak’s being told him that the risk was too great, that what they had could never be ressurected. Still, he wanted to hope. He wanted to trust that thing with feathers perched in his soul. After all, it had been Julian who had helped him discover it in the first place.


End file.
